HAROLD LLOYD'S WORLD OF COMEDY.

By William Cahn '34. New York:Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1964. 208 pp.$4.95.

The smash hit of the Cannes Film Festival of 1962 was an odd melange of film sequences, some silent and some in sound, Produced in Hollywood from 1925 through 1932, and starring a slightly-built man with horn-rimmed spectacles - the immortal comedian, Harold Lloyd. The re-issued film sequences selected from eight of Lloyd's best movies were subsequently shown to sellout audiences, rocking with laughter, in Europe and the United States under the title which author Cahn has chosen for his latest book.

During the past decade Bill Cahn, once a newspaper reporter, has developed something of a "formula" for creating vividly interesting and exciting books. He selects a popular personality or theme - Einstein, Van Cliburn, Jimmy Durante, Harold Lloyd, the Jazz age, the era of great American Comedians - then combines crisp, precise prose (sprinkled liberally with direct quotations) and a profuse collection of well-selected illustrations (photographs, news clippings, copies of old programs, billboards, photostatic letters and other memorabilia) to create what his publishers term "pictorial biographies" of a person or an era.

His current study, and in this reviewer's opinion his best, is Harold Lloyd's Worldof Comedy, for here he reports on both a great personality and a great era. Apparently Lloyd talked at considerable length with Cahn about his own career and on the "Golden Age of Comedy," of which he was so much a part. Through Lloyd we come to know and more fully appreciate some of his contemporaries - Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Mark Sennett, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers. Lloyd and author Cahn also have some interesting anecdotes and observations on some of today's comedians - Red Skelton, Dick Van Dyke, Lucille Ball, and Jack Lennon.

In a dust jacket endorsement of this book, Harold Lloyd writes:

"Our nation's comic traditions are great. We should not lose sight of them. Such traditions are not the products of any one person or small group of people. They developed as the nation developed. Today laughter is more important than ever; it is a bond of friendship which unites the past with the present; and peoples of all languages, ages, and points of view."

Harold Lloyd has made his own distinctive and important contribution to our nation's comic traditions, and we can be grateful that Bill Cahn has so warmly and perceptively documented that contribution and the great personalities and era from which it came.